Footings Poured and Starting Stem Walls

If any of you have the sudden urge to go into pouring concrete for a living, let me talk to you first. Whew! Pouring concrete is hard work! We poured our footings on Wednesday the 18th. Marty directed the spout from the truck, Joshua scooped with a shovel and made sure it went in evenly, and I followed behind and smoothed it out. It was tough work but worth the money saved, plus it feels soooo nice to have something besides trenches dug in the ground ;) 

Thursday night we started putting down clips and bending rebar for the next step in the foundation...stem walls. We have to build plywood forms on top the concrete footings, then we'll fill the forms with concrete and take the plywood down and reuse it as subfloor. Concrete for the stems is scheduled for this coming Thursday, we're hoping to take the forms off Friday night and get started on the pony walls on Saturday. 

Pony walls are wooden walls that are on top of the stems, then we can put the floor joists on the pony walls and then the subfloor! It is going to feel so good to nail down that subfloor and walk on it :) 

Jonathan came down Friday night and helped us out a little bit on Saturday, we squared the house out (it was 7 inches out of square...yipes!!) and marked the lines for the stem wall. Uncle Marty cleaned off the dirt piles that were in the middle of the house. It looks so much nicer all smoothed out :) 

Ok, I'll stop rambling and show you some pictures! :)

The first line of footings...

We had just enough extra concrete to make a little concrete pad for our porch steps come onto! It's going to look cute with potted plants on it :)

Concrete in the ground, woo-hoo!

Uncle Marty smoothing out the ground Saturday

Trying to figure out where exactly the house was out of square

Stem walls halfway up!

More pictures of finished stem walls after this weekend!! 

Until the next update, 

Joshua and Rebecca